About Crisis Group

Jean-Marie Guéhenno

President & CEO
Brussels, Belgium & New York, USA

Jean-Marie Guéhenno has served as President & CEO of the International Crisis Group since September 2014. Prior to his appointment, he was the Arnold Saltzman Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University and the director of its centre for international conflict resolution (School of International and Public Affairs). He is also a non-resident Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In 2012, he was appointed deputy joint special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League for Syria. He left that position to chair the commission appointed by President François Hollande to review the French Defense and national security posture. Between 2000 and 2008, he served as the United Nations’ Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations. A former French diplomat, he held the position of Chairman of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale between 1998 and 2000, and served as director of the French policy planning staff and as ambassador to the Western European Union.

Mr Guéhenno is active on several boards and panels, including the board of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the Panel of Eminent Persons on European Security. Mr Guéhenno is an Officer of the ‘Légion d’honneur’ and a Commander of the ‘Bundesverdienstkreuz’ of Germany.

He is married and has one daughter.

The Fog of Peace

A Memoir of International Peacekeeping in the 21st Century

For more than a decade, international peacekeeping forces have been engaged in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan - yet peace is far from secured. Meanwhile, a skeptical observer is left wondering if anything can be accomplished by costly interventions in faraway lands, especially as fear of more immediate threats - most acutely in the form of terrorist acts orchestrated by individuals or small groups - loom in the streets of New York, London, Paris, and other major cities.

In The Fog of Peace, Jean-Marie Guéhenno reflects on some of the most difficult questions facing international interventions today. Guéhenno draws on his experience as the head of the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations from 2000 to 2008, a period that included intense negotiations and spiraling crises in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. He returned to the United Nations in 2012 to act as Kofi Annan’s deputy in negotiations designed to find a - so far elusive - sustainable solution to the war in Syria.